Genetics of essential hypertension.

Essential hypertension affects 1 billion people worldwide and its genetic basis is well established. For this review we surveyed the literature on the genetics of hypertension during the past 18 months and we now report the highlights. There has been publication of the two largest genome scans for blood pressure and new loci including significant linkage to chromosome 6q have been reported. The molecular basis of Gordon's syndrome has been partially unravelled with a dual function for WNK4 in ion transport regulation being discovered. There has also been progress in narrowing rodent quantitative trait loci using congenic approaches and several linkage peaks have now been demonstrated to have more than one loci. We also report some of the initial findings from pharmacogenetic studies.